In the battle between Lotus Notes and Microsoft Exchange, the latest release of Notes/Domino may shake Exchange's grip on the server as Outlook maintains client supremacy.

IBM's new Lotus Notes/Domino 6.0 contains myriad features for better
administration and usability. Yet if you're planning an upgrade from
Release 5.x -- or a migration from Microsoft Exchange, for instance -- is
it better to go ahead now, or to wait for a while? Analysts see advantages
to either approach.

"R6 is a very healthy upgrade. It offers the usability and scalability
we've been waiting for since 5.x., and it takes care of the major things we
were concerned about," maintains Joyce Graff, vice president and research
director at Gartner Group.

In the heated battle between Notes and Exchange, Microsoft has been trying
to lure away Lotus users through mechanisms such as Microsoft Application
Analyzer, a new software product for planning migrations to Exchange.

Notes/Domino R6, however, heightens certain advantages that Lotus already
held over Exchange anyway, in the opinion of some analysts. In fact, some
Exchange customers will leave Microsoft Outlook on the desktop, while
transitioning to Lotus as the server engine, according to Jasmine Noel, who
is principal at JNoel Associates.

"Lotus runs (well) on consolidated or clustered servers. Because of the
weak economy, IT departments have been told to consolidate. Distributed
systems have a lot of excess capacity that is not being used, and they're
more expensive to manage than a single server, or a few clustered servers.
IBM believes that if it can spread this technology around far and fast
enough, it can break the lock Microsoft Exchange has on back end servers,"
contends Noel.

Domino also continues to hold leadership over Exchange in terms of workflow
management, according to Gartner's Graff. "You can build more applications
with Lotus," she adds.

'You can even make it look like Outlook'
Moreover, the user interface in 6.0 is competitive with Outlook, in Graff's
view. "You can make (6.0) look like anything you want. You can (even) make
it look like Outlook. I think people will find the user interface very
attractive."

"The user interface enhancements will be important to administrators
because they'll make Domino and Notes easier to manage," concurs Craig
Roth, vice president of Web and collaborative strategies at the Meta Group.

Roth also points out that, with the release of R6 in early October, Lotus
has successfully met IBM's recently set 18-month release schedule for new
editions of Notes/Domino.

Where is 'roaming user' support?
Lotus, though, did leave out certain features originally planned for R6. In
the Release Notes to Notes R6, inclusion of these capabilities is promised
for the first maintenance release.

"Since the beginning of the Notes/Domino 6 development cycle, we have
clearly stated that quality is paramount. To demonstrate our level of
commitment, each and every feature of the product is tested against a
strict set of quality metrics," according to the release notes.

"As a result of this thorough testing, we have decided that the Single Copy
Template server feature, the Roaming User feature, and the ability to read
encrypted mail for iNotes Web Access will be deferred to the first
maintenance release of the Notes/Domino 6 code stream."

Analysts don't consider these omissions to be that significant, overall.
"R6 had to meet stringent criteria in order to be released. One of the
criteria was that IBM should be able to run its business on it. So I would
think that the features Lotus left out were areas that still needed some
work," says Graff.

Of the features deferred to the maintenance release, roaming user support
seems to have the most impact. "Roaming access would be nice, but the call
might have been more intense for it before, anyway," according to the
Gartner analyst. The current economic climate isn't as conducive to travel
and "roaming," she explains.

Meanwhile, some systems administrators have suspected a bug or two in
either the final release of R6 or the prerelease candidate.."It appears
that Notes 6 has a bug when spacing (the) outlines page. It removes any
spaces in between the outlines. The original (R5) page is much clearer and
easier to use than the Notes 6 one that destroyed all the vertical spacing!
Notes Designer still shows the page correctly, however," writes one user,
in the Notes/Domino 6 Forum on Lotus Developer Domain.

"R6 Bug?" is the title of another message, posted to the
comp.groupware.lotus-notes.admin newsgroup. "I have rules set up in R6 to
move new messages to folders. Sometimes, a folder is bolded and shows a
count of 'X' number of unread messages and other times it doesn't show that
there are unread messages in the folder. I am using the release candidate
on a win2K machine," according to the posting.

Another alternative to the R6 maintenance upgrade is to wait even longer -
for the release of Notes/Domino 7.0, targeted for another 18 months from
now, or for RNext, planned by Lotus for mid-2003.

"When RNext comes out, Domino will work on two entirely different
platforms. RNext will provide a totally modern architecture, based on
(products) like WebSphere and Tivoli," Roth predicts.

Lotus users on faster track
So far, though, Notes/Domino customers have been relatively quick to
upgrade, according to Graff. "Gartner's research indicates that more than
80 percent of Lotus users are already at Release 5.0 (or above). In
comparison, only about 10 percent of Microsoft Exchange users have moved to
Exchange 2000," says the Gartner analyst.